Thinking about poetry from the point of view of composition and personal reading

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

NOTES ON EDWARD THOMAS 20-11-13

We’ve seen Edward Thomas as
lyricist, as in the moment of insight at Adlestrop. But connected to this is the Edward Thomas of
memory – the untraceable scent of Lad’s Love.
In both of these we’ve seen a way of focusing on names, which like the
scent are there and yet their meaning is not ‘in’ them.

Connected in turn to this
we’ve seen the Edward Thomas of speaking,
the mystical speech of the Aspens implicitly connected to the speech
traditionally breathed into the poet by the Muse.

And in all of these, there’s
the Edward Thomas of ‘nature’, the English countryside which provides a kind of
‘meaning’ for all the words, though not an easily definable meaning, a meaning more in the sense of ‘the meaning
of life’ than ‘the meaning of the word’.
A meaning always just beyond the words, the senses, the fingertips.

In The Other, the attempt to run down a meaning, in the sense of ‘who
am I’, proves ambiguous. The Other is
finally discovered, or rather discovers Thomas, only to reject him, and at the
same time confirm Thomas’s dependence on him,
rather as the mind depends upon the brain or the body for its life.
In this poem Thomas briefly finds a kind of solace in his own solitude,
his sense that there is a kind of oneness in nature, in which he can take part,
‘melancholy’ as that is – a mixture of belonging and solitude, which mirrors
his relationship to his ‘other’ self.

And then in Lob, he
approaches the same theme of belonging of selfhood in a different way, seeing the
‘other’ - in the form of Lob, who has
been left behind and can’t be found again -
as inhabiting earth, naming the
earth, being dissolved in it as he had been in the scent and the endless past
in Old Man.

In The Other for a moment he
found himself as ‘ an old inhabitant of earth’, now he founds a different kind
of alter ego who is an inhabitant of earth too, indeed a part of it, and a naming of it, an intuitive even anti-intellectual familiar of the southern English
landscape, a presence with many
different names, and who doesn’t
exist in ordinary time. The
difference, I see, between The Other and Lob is the relative optimism of the
latter. The Other is lonely, facing the
essential solitude of the individual;
Lob is a kind of dispersal of that solitude through a kind of love, what
we call ‘love of nature’, and indeed like human love in the same that it
involves a loss of the boundaries of ‘I’.

It’s this ‘love’ that Thomas
comes to defend in This is no Petty Case of Right and Wrong. This poem is a departure from what we’ve
read before in the sense that it is polemical.
It draws on the feeling for
England shown in Lob, Adelstrop, and other poems about landscape and creatures
but it focuses on the issue of patriotism,
and what they means to him. Not flag waving and hatred of the Kaiser, and nothing to do with what he sees as empty
propaganda which to use might seem ‘tabloid’ in tone. The arguments anyway don’t mean much more to
him that the storm and the wind. The
landscape and history of such as Lob is at risk, perhaps already destroyed and
what will rise out of the ashes is unpredictable.

‘I am one crying, God save ~England, lest

We lose what never slaves and
cattle blessed.

The ages made her that made
us from dust.’

He is in effect defining
himself, and himself within Lob and the birds of
Gloucestershire.

Thomas sees the context of
this war more thoughtfully in As the Team’s Head-Brass, where he approaches it
through narrative and in the dialogue of a farmer and himself agonising as to
whether to join the army – which he need not do at the age of 37. The fallen elm, the shrinking area of crop
to be cut, the circling of the plough
and horses, the anecdote about the dead
man, all suggest ideas of destruction, change, need to make a decision.

This poem is less
introspective, or less directly
introspective, than The Other, or Aspens, or Adlestrop, and is a narrative poem
in which emotions and thoughts are hinted at rather than explored. The lovers are there in the poem but without comment. They may suggest Hardy’s poem about the war,
In Times of the Breaking of Nations, where the lovers’ preoccupation are seen
as eternal compared to the temporary war.

And the final line with it’s
carefully judge assonance and consonance
may remind us of Seamus Heaney’s poem, Follower, about his relation to his
father ploughing.

There’s Nothing Like the Sun
and Rain deal with the sense of death.
In Rain , written in an army hut, the focus is on ‘Remembering again
that I shall die’, but There’s Nothing Like the Sun emphasises both
the overall embracing fealty of the sun and at the same time the relative
unimportance of human beings, as the list in the third lines shows. The sun is kind of ‘stones and men and birds
and beasts and flies’, and he goes on
to give a sense of the wonder of being alive, the wonder of seeing experience
things - somewhere near Wordsworthian in
tone, and yet it homes in on the idea of the finality of death. He draws on the often express relation
between our love of life and awareness of its shortness.

Tall Nettles is a mysterious
poem, and in reading it we need to think about its reference to the meaning of
the rundown farmyard, which may not be so just because the men have gone off to
war. After all I’s been in this state’
these many springs’. And Thomas’s love
of the nettles ‘as well as any bloom upon a flower’ is connected in his mind with the dust they
get covered with, and which the rain removes showing ‘the sweetness of a
shower’.

There is perhaps a parallel
between his sense of life against death in There’s Nothing Like the Sun, and
the way dust on a nettle makes us the more aware of its freshness when washed
by rain.